This 1970 aerial photograph
of East Berlin, was taken by Ed Branch, Lt.Colonel, US Army, retired. Rev.
Branch is now a minister and lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. In the center
of the photograph, you will notice a 1,100 ft. TV tower (known as the
Fernsehturm in German) with a spherical structure near the top. The steel
and glass ball is a natural reflector of light, and as you can see, the
reflection is in the shape of a cross. The irony of this structure lies in
the attempt by the then communist government to exclude all references to
God and Christ from society. During the Cold War period, under Soviet
occupation, East Germany, like all those behind the "iron curtain" at that
time, were forced to remove God from public life. Churches were confiscated
and many were turned into museums or for some other government use. This
particular structure was to be a prideful symbol of East Germany's
engineering expertise and ability, void of any reliance upon God, and to
show the world that communism was a good thing. However, no matter how much
the engineers tried to prevent the sun's light from reflecting in the form
of a cross, they failed. The pope's revenge!!

Strausberger Platz with constructivism
style building

"Hochhaus" in Weberwiese- the first high
rise apartment that was built after the war

Karl Marx Allee apartments

GDR-era mural of Meissen porcelain on
former Council of Ministers building, facing Leipziger Straße

Wall plaque of Lenin, off Wilhelmstraße
and Statues of Marx and Engels, Marx-Engels-Forum

East Berlin was the name given to the eastern part of Berlin between 1949
and 1990. It consisted of the Soviet sector of Berlin that was
established in 1945. The American, British and French sectors became
West Berlin, a de facto part of West Germany.

Despite its status as part of an occupied city, East Berlin was
claimed as the the capital of East Germany. From August 13, 1961 until
November 9, 1989 it was separated from West Berlin by the Berlin Wall.
The official East German lexicon referred to East Berlin as just
"Berlin" or often "Berlin, Hauptstadt der DDR" (Berlin, capital of the
GDR). The term "Democratic Sector" was also used until the early - mid
1960s.

The Western Allies (the USA, Great Britain and France) never
formally acknowledged the authority of the East German government to
govern East Berlin; the official Allied protocol recognized only the
authority of the Soviet Union in East Berlin in accordance with the
occupation status of Berlin as a whole. In fact, the three Western
commandants regularly protested the presence of the East German National
People's Army(NPA) in East Berlin, particularly on the occasion of
military parades. Nevertheless, the three Western Allies eventually
established embassies in East Berlin in the 1970s, although they never
recognized it as East Germany's capital. Treaties instead used terms
such as "seat of government."

At the time of German reunification, East Berlin comprised the
boroughs of

East Berlin todaySince reunification, the German government has spent
vast amounts of money on reintegrating the two halves of the city and
bringing services and infrastructure in the former East Berlin up the
standard established in West Berlin. Despite this, there are still
obvious differences between eastern and western Berlin. East Berlin has
a distinctly different visual aspect, partly because of the greater
survival of prewar facades and streetscapes, many still showing signs of
wartime damage, and partly because of the distinctive style of urban
architecture used in the GDR. As in other former East German cities, a
small number of GDR-era names commemorating socialist heroes have been
preserved, such as Karl-Marx-Allee, Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and
Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse; this followed a long process of review in which
many such street names were deemed inappropriate and were changed.